Everybody is talking about Big Data. It’s a top priority for businesses big and small in 2015. Big Data may be the next big thing, but the truth is many business owners and marketing teams are overwhelmed by the constant influx of information from billions of connected devices. Recent research shows companies are drowning under the weight of Big Data, unable to transform information into actionable insight. The burden is sure to get worse as more connections come online everyday, some 500 billion connected devices are expected by the end of the decade.
Researchers from B2B technology firm EMC believe Big Data will play a role in many of the “make or break” business moments ahead. In the future, success will be built around using data to reveal new opportunities including untapped markets, improving transparency, agile innovations and many more. Businesses know Big Data is valuable, yet most can’t figure out how to use it. They admit data has changed both customer and business expectations, yet less than one third of companies interviewed by EMC access data in real time.
CRM giant Salesforce wants to help businesses navigate this unfamiliar territory, and as part of that goal, the company announced last week a new partnership with Google, Cloudera, Hortonworks, New Relic, Informatica, and Trifacta. These six companies are working to develop tools that would make it easier to move data out of Salesforce’s Wave Analytics Cloud. The end goal is a series of plugins that would make it possible for users to take data from the Salesforce’s newest cloud, pull it into software from any of the five partners run various queries against it and then reintroduce it into the original or other applications. In discussing the partnership during the first quarter results call, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called Wave a “game-changer.” Adding Wave, launched in October 2014, “is a platform with a whole ecosystems of partners and a development environment that lets you basically build any kind of analytics app our customers want.”
In action, Fortune envisions executives bringing together disparate data sets. Imagine, a marketing officer using the tools to link usage patterns in Cloudera or Hortonworks with customer demographics from Salesforce. The potential is endless. Bringing together data from various providers could reveal weaknesses that could be fixed via sales promotion or highlight a development issue that could send a product back to the drawing board. And that’s just the beginning.
For now, the proposed collaboration tools are just proposals. The timing of the software releases will depend on each partner provider, but Salesforce SVP Keith Bigelow told Fortune some of the collaboration tools are ready for consumer testing. As for cost, the tools would be free. Bigelow believes the innovative tools will capture new business for the partners and encourage new users to sign-on for the paid services of the partners.
Salesforce is the No. 1 customer relationship manager as ranked by research firm Gartner. Its system holds tons of valuable customer data that could be parsed by users unlocking all types of insights—if only they knew how. That’s where partners come in. For example, Google offers multiple analytical tools, with names like BigQuery and DataFlow, which are looking for a way into the business arena. The mutual advantage for both software providers and users is clear.
Making Big Data analysis more user friendly could be the final push it needs to go from talked about to used in day-to-day operations. Businesses understand they need to find ways to capitalize on big data. Software providers understand businesses need help figuring out how to do it. Big Data without analysis is nothing more than white noise.
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